This looks like respite, but there's no real relief in sight Easterners. Keep right on reading, Californiacs!
Yes, California is beautiful.
Once upon a time, a Native Son lay dying. He did not know that he was going to die. His physician had to break the news to him. He told the Californian that the process would not be long or painful. He would go to sleep presently and when he woke up, the great journey would have been accomplished. His words fulfilled themselves. Soon the Native Son fell into a coma. When he opened his eyes he was in Paradise. He raised himself up, gave one look about and exclaimed, "What a boob that doctor was! Whad'da he mean—Paradise! Here I am still in California."
Man has of course, here as elsewhere, chained nature; set her to toil for him. She is a willing worker everywhere, but in California she puts no stay nor stint on her productive efforts. California produces—Now up to this moment I have held myself in. Looking back on my copy I see only such meager words as "beauty", "glory", "splendor", such pale, inadequate phrases as "super-mundane fertility" and "super-solar fecundity". What use are words and phrases when one speaks of California. It is time for us to abandon them both and resort to some bright, snappy sparkling statistics.
Reader, I had to soft-pedal here. If I gave you the correct statistics, You wouldn't believe me.
So here goes!
California produces forty per cent of the gold, fifty per cent of the wheat, sixty per cent of the oranges, seventy per cent of the prunes, eighty per cent of the asparagus and (including the Native Daughters) ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths per cent of the peaches of the world. I pause to say here that none of these figures is true. They are all made up for the occasion. But don't despair! I am sure that they don't do California justice by half. Any other Californiac—with the mathematical memory which I unfortunately lack—will provide the correct data. Somebody told me once, I seem to recall, that the Santa Clara valley produces sixty per cent of the worlds prunes. But I may be mistaken. What I prefer to remember is one day's trip in that springtide of prune bloom. For hours and hours of motor speed, we glided through a snowy world that showed no speck of black bark or fleck of green leaf; a world in which the sole relief from a silent white blizzard of blossom was the blue of the sky arch, the purple of distant lupines alternating with the gold of blood-centered poppies, pouring like avalanches down hills of emerald green.
Getting out of the scenery zone only to fall into the climate zone. Reader, it's just the same with the climate as the scenery. It's got to be done some time, so why not now?
That's what California produces in the way of scenery and fodder. So now, let's consider the climate, even if I am invading Jesse Williams's territory. For it has magical properties—that climate of California. It makes people grow big and beautiful and strenuous; it makes flowers grow big and beautiful; it makes fleas grow big and—strenuous. It offers, except in the most southern or the most mountainous regions, no such extremes of heat or cold as are found elsewhere in the country. Its marvel is of course the season which corresponds to our winter. The visitor coming, let us say in February, from the ice-bound and frost-locked East through the flat, dreary Middle West, and stalled possibly on the way, remains glued in stupefaction to the car window. In a very few hours he slides from the white, glittering snow-covered heights of the evergreen-packed Sierras through their purple, hazy, snow-filled depths into the sudden warmth of California.
It is like waking suddenly from a nightmare of winter to a poets or a painter's vision of spring.